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Weekend Warrioring

This weekend saw Subdreddit launch an invasion force on behalf of the Amarr militia. In theory, this invasion should have flipped a large number of planets into the hands of the Amarr.

To be honest, though I think this weekend’s attempted invasion shows a few spots where Dust is a bit lacking. I really shouldn’t say “lacking,” I think, because I know this is something that is being worked on, but right now it doesn’t seem to be working too well.

I say this because of the amount of no-shows we had this weekend on our contracts. We were running contracts all weekend, and I personally participated in two of those corp battles. In both the fights I was in, we had no opponents, so the fight turned into a vehicle practice session for us. We watched as the guns slowly took down the enemy MCC and we tried not to kill ourselves while driving around in bumper cars.

I heard of some Subdredditors who were in more than 4 of the corp battles where we had no one show up to fight us. If the contract was accepted, it wasn’t too bad because at least we flipped control of the planet (without a fight, I might add), but if the contract wasn’t accepted, and no one took up the defend order, not only is the planet not flipped, but we lose our collateral as well.

This seems like a big problem to me.

I mean, New Eden is all about the “non-consensual” PvP, right? It seems to me that in it’s present form, the contract system would be easily exploitable. Don’t want someone attacking your planet’s districts? Then just don’t accept any of the defend contracts.

This does not sounds like the New Eden I know and love. I can’t imagine this is how it’s going to play out in the final launch, so I’m just assuming that CCP is aware of this thing, and it won’t be an issue when it comes time to really start taking space.

So that was pretty much the extent of my Dust activities this weekend. Unfortunately not particularly exciting, BUT I did get a chance to get more EVE time in than I had thought I would, and that turned out to be a much more exciting venture than I had originally anticipated.

So I logged on Sunday afternoon to take care of some character management business. As I often do, I load up Jabber on my smart phone so I can keep an eye on it while EVE is full screen. As I’m loading up the client, I notice a Jabber ping that went out for a kitchen sink fleet being FCed by varoc506. They were leaving the system right as I loaded the station, and it had been a bit since I was in a fleet, so I undocked in my interceptor (Ares) and went to catch up.

I had no idea what varoc’s plan was, but I imagined this was just going to be a fun little roam where we shoot some bads and rustle some jimimes.

I was not disappointed.

We were a fleet of around 40, so while we weren’t the biggest blob cruising null sec that evening (as I’ll get into later), we were a formidable force. Apparently, Varoc’s intel had let him know about a little enemy gate camp in the area, and he had gotten it into his mind that that was just something we could not allow.

So we shut it down. Yay, us! I got myself onto two kill mails in that battle. Apparently we lost three frigates in the fight, but since we caused 1.85 Billion in damages, I think we won the ISK war.

Flying high after shutting down the gate camp in V-3YG7, our kitchen sink fleet continued on our roam through Catch into CVA space and dipping into Providence. We moved down the pipe from V-3 towards Providence, and Varoc’s intel came through again, stopping us at D-GTMI, the first system into Providence, and CVA territory. This is when strange things began to happen.

Varoc was using our intel map (map.pleaseignore.com for you newbros who haven’t found it, yet) to keep an eye out for other fleets who may be interested in dropping in on us. While we were waiting on intel in D-G, the intel map goes down! Whaaaat? I have no idea what happened, but I hear Veroc over coms say that apparently the intel map has gotten a bit of a DDOS attack.

Just as this is happening, our scout tackles a drake in the next system over, T-RPFU. We can’t just let this opportunity go to waste, so Veroc tells us all to jump into T-R and grab the Drake. For some reason, I thought I heard the scout say he had the Drake on the SMD-S1 gate, so as soon as I load grid in T-R, I hit “warp to” the SMD gate.

While this was a mistake, it would end up being a mistake that saved my ship.

Being in an interceptor, I have awesome align and warp out time. It takes me a little over 3 seconds from pushing button to being in warp. In those three seconds, as I’m aligning and about to warp to the SMD gate, I watch as a fleet of around 70 neutrals warps right onto us.

I’m in between warping to the SMD gate, and then back to the D-G gate when the enemy fleet drops bubbles and then this goes down.

By the time I get back, Veroc is telling everyone to scramble if they can make it out, and seeing as how I land on the outside of the bubble a good 30km from the gate of so, it was time for me to turn around. I had locked a naga on the outside of the bubble, but by this time all my buddies had been de-shipped, so I was starting to draw some attention. After I start taking damage, I find a random planet and warp out. I made it out with about 50% shields, so it wasn’t that close of a call.

I wasn’t the only one to make it out either. We had six others who had survived the fight and bugged out to random planets in the system. Being the only interceptor to survive (only 2 of the 7 survivors were in frigs, both the Tech 2 kind), I begin bouncing around planets making safe spots. After making a couple, Veroc and the rest of the fleet warp to me and I begin making a rolling safe.

We know we still have an enemy fleet of about 70 in system, and with only 7 of us left, Veroc is wondering how he’s going to get the survivors out of this situation and back home. Everyone falls in formation behind me as I’m making the rolling safe, and I see Varoc in his thorax, a brutix, a thrasher, a talwar (driven by Darkfury Beta, a buddy of mine from my very first corp =P), an anathema and a sabre. Including my ares, this was the surviving fleet from the T-R ambush.

We jump around a bit, trying to avoid our new pursuers, and were able to slip out of the 7MD gate to take the long way home. Three jumps into the sojourn back to K-6, right as we’re about to jump into TA3T-3, I hear Varoc getting super excited. He tells Sandybox, our sabre pilot, to drop bubble. As I load grid, I see a tasty neutral dominix caught in our delicious bubble of doom. I hit my “orbit at 500m” and put my disruptor and scram on him just as he clears the bubble.